UCL Beacon School in Holocaust Education 2019-20

UCL Beacon School in Holocaust Education 2019-20

We are delighted to announce Beacon High have successfully applied to be part of the UCL Holocaust Beacon School 2019-2020 programme. This is an exciting and important opportunity. The work begins in earnest in September, with the project launching in July.

The Holocaust Education promotes and teaches students to challenge misconceptions in society and allows students to develop their own values regarding human rights, prejudice and justice.

The programme is in complete harmony with our school ethos; Believe, Belong, Become- Where dreams inspire futures.

I believe that it is vital as an RE/ PSHE leader in such a multi-cultural environment to instil a sense of belonging and identity and to develop community cohesion amongst our students and future leaders of society.

More details to follow - we are very proud of this!

The Holocaust was a catastrophe not only for its millions of victims but also for our view of ourselves, of who we are, our faith in human nature, and a belief in western progress and ‘civilization’. If we are not prepared to consider what went wrong in modern society that allowed state persecution of political opponents; mass murder of the disabled; European genocide of the Roma (Gypsies); and ultimately led to an attempt to murder every last Jewish man, woman and child, then how can we consider ourselves to be educated people at all?

“You can’t interpret the world without understanding the Holocaust”

Learning about such events can be profoundly disturbing. Our programme helps teachers to support young people as they deal with powerful and sometimes disorientating feelings, helping them to express themselves and to develop their emotional literacy. It also explores how and why the Holocaust happened through detailed historical study of the most extensively documented, intensively researched, and best understood genocide in human history.

This combination of the affective and the cognitive realms is essential if we are to both strengthen a commitment to genocide prevention and, through careful comparison with other examples of mass violence, to better identify the warning signs of future atrocities and to understand what sort of interventions might be available in order to prevent them.